A while back I read Piranesi by this author, and thought since I enjoyed it so much it might be interesting to read some of her previous works. Little did I know that this book, written back in the 1990s, was such a huge book.
A book of this size allows for a great deal of flexibility and pacing, and certainly the story proceeds at a very slow pace. It was tough to get started, and there were parts in the middle where my attention was wandering, but in the end the book wrapped up with an excellent resolution.
Later I read that the book actually began as sort of serialized short stories, that gradually grew into the complete book. This made sense, as each section worked well within itself but sometimes jarred with the ones around it.
What I liked about reading this was that it felt so very British, containing characters that were warm, polite, sarcastic, and occasionally quite funny. The villains were written especially well.
I think in the end the ambitious scale tripped up the flow of the story for me, and so I would have liked to seen a more slimmed down version of this – I felt like I was reading the “director’s cut” and some judicious editing would have helped out.
There were some hints of Piranesi here – you could see where the idea of that story had occurred to the author – and for that glimpse of the future it was worth reading for me.
Next I’m reading The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon by Bill McKibben.
